One day this spring, I was working concession at my town’s movie theater and a girl who I haven’t seen in a couple of years walked up to me. Let’s call her Anna Kendrick. Anna Kendrick was set up with me by my friend and his then-girlfriend in 2012. It didn’t necessarily work out for us, but we did end on good terms. Being that we were from different towns, I hadn’t seen her again until that day. She walked up to me. I was excited to see her since it had been two years. Sure, things didn’t work out, but it’s a unique experience for a kid to have a “long-time-no-see” moment, given that that seems to happen more in adulthood.

“Hey, Brent,” she said very softly.

“Hey, Anna Kendrick. How’s it going?”

“Good. What college are you going to?”

“Rutgers. You?”

Let’s say she said Oxford.

“Oh, that’s cool.” She was so uncomfortable, though. The soft, soft tone of her voice. The perfunctory small talk question. The overall disinterest in the situation. I’ve talked to people that I’ve liked significantly less than I liked her, and they probably reciprocated the feeling, and I’ve had more enthusiastic conversations than this.

Anna Kendrick ordered, something it seems as if she were really waiting for, said goodbye, and left. What could have been a quaint, simple catch up turned into an awkward mistake.

Awkwardness is something that people seem to not like, yet it happens all the time. Why? One can see it as a valid emotion, but I argue that awkwardness is an artificial construct, one that is benign in regards to other emotions. Due to its synthetic quality, one that doesn’t have to do with true emotions that humans need, such as love or hate or prurience, it’s something that could and should be destroyed.

Awkwardness is a very common emotion, at least it's perceived to be in the U.S. Why so? Here’s a reason: America is predicated on small talk. It’s something people do every day and it coincides with the American lifestyle. For one, Americans have hard, long workdays, ones where people are on a tight schedule. If one were to talk to another person, it would only be in short bursts. Again with the careers, America is also predicated on careers. Small talk is an excellent way for people to get what they want from other people without making it sound evil. Even if it is.

What small talk does, more than anything, is keep people from having real, vulnerable conversations with each other, ones where all the B.S. of the world can just float away while people are actually talking about something interesting. Sadly, there aren’t many opportunities for these conversations to happen and, thus, small talk is the way to go. And small talk is fertile ground for awkwardness, too. For one, the conversations are often short. Therefore, so many structures of conversation must be fit into minutes, possibly even seconds. By structures I mean the small little social cues. The eye contact to start the conversation. The excuse to end it. The gauge in being interested in someone without being too personal. All of this fit in such a small space starts to outweigh what’s actually being said. It already gives a simulation sort of feel to it and if one unwritten rule gets broken the conversation is difficult to repair.

Small talk is also prevalent because of America’s fantastic track run on controversial issues. Take the Lucy Van Pelt quote from "Peanuts" Thanksgiving special “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown.” “There are three things that I've learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.” If one were to talk about those things, it wouldn’t be awkward as much as it would be angry, but having our culture ignore cerebral conversations that don’t necessarily have to be religion, politics, or the Great Pumpkin substitutes the weight of the actual conversation being said and it slowly becomes what the conversation entails—and not in an English major analytic lens kind of way.

I think, most of all, small talk is a product of us not wanting to be lost in anything anymore. With technology rising and committed activities such as reading dropping, our culture seems to not want to truly be entranced in anything, always thinking of doing the next thing. It reminds me of this "Boyhood" quote: “You don't care what your friends are up to on Saturday afternoon but you're also obviously not fully experiencing my profound bitching so ... it's like everyone's just stuck in, like, an in-between state. Not really experiencing anything.” And this constant social awareness, this inability to really experience, living in this “okay, cool, now let me get my popcorn” society paves a clear path for awkwardness to seep in.

Another reason for the American prevalence for awkwardness is the American prevalence for melodrama. After school specials, high school dramas, and the works are integral to the American media, something that Americans consume exponentially. In melodrama, small conflicts are heightened for their dramatic value, even if the actual situation even entails it. And it’s everywhere. There’s even a show called "Awkward!" On MTV, of all places! And it’s probably the most successful actual show that MTV has ever had!

The fallout is simple: people apply what they see on TV to their actual lives. And, no, it’s usually not something as cute as someone making a sly "Arrested Development" reference that no one else will get because, unfortunately, no one has seen that show. No, it’s the storylines. The two-dimensional character traits. And that applies to melodrama. Maybe it’s the American predication of wanting to be inside a TV show. They want to think their lives are important. And, of course, they totally are, but they have to prove it to themselves in such a way that is self-absorbed, thinking that so many things are at crisis level. In actuality, I see it to be a true testament to character if one were to stand above any “social injustice”, saying to oneself, “I’m above this; I’m confident enough in myself to not be personally offended by this situation."

Small talk and melodrama lend a significant hand in the implementation of awkwardness. I’d like to think that small talk sets the stage and melodrama does the performance. Awkwardness can be easily avoidable, though, which is why it should be avoidable. Take my conversation with Anna Kendrick. Yes, we were supposed to be something two years ago, but it didn’t work out. Is that really something so horribly bad? It’s not as if we were dating; we were not an intimate couple who were more than just two people. It was just something that didn’t happen; there’s no shame in that. And can we talk about the statute of limitation? Isn’t two years enough time to let bygones—or lack thereof—be bygones? Come on, time has passed.

And this conversation, too, had the melodrama and the small talk. Was the “awkward” over looming subject matter dramatized? Check. Did we commit small talk? Well we talked about what colleges we were going to, the most talked about thing among high school seniors so I’m going to have to check with that one, too.

This conversation could have gone so many different ways. We could have talked about what we were up to, how our relationship was going with mine and Anna Kendrick’s friend, the one that set us up in the first place. We could have talked about how she was doing with her softball or how I was doing with basketball, but the rudimentary kicked in. And, no, discussing colleges isn’t an insignificant subject matter; in some situations it might mean the world. However, this is such an uninspired topic. It’s one that, when looked into, doesn’t necessarily matter if we didn’t go to the same school. Cool, we’re going to colleges. Looks like we won’t really need to know, though, because we aren’t making plans to see each other anymore.

This conversation takes a trodden over path in the most trodden over in ways. Yes, hypocrisy does start to seem to kick in here, me being a part of that conversation while criticizing the practice, but there wasn’t much I could do. She began the conversation with the dead-end college topic and her tone was one of someone who didn’t want to be bothered with. Thus segueing to my next argument. There are several activities where it is often known for taking two to participate: the tango, car crashes, and consensual sex are among those. Awkwardness, though, can be created simply from one person.

Conversations are two-way things. In a world of one-way, TV, VR, and porn being a few examples, the conversation is a sacred bond that can only be performed with two people. It’s like a three-legged race: if one person slows down, both people slow down. This can’t be stressed enough with awkwardness. If one person were to keep spouting original, open-ended topics and the other would just shoot them down by just one-word answers, the conversation really goes nowhere. It might have an interesting premise but it goes nowhere. There’s no journey, nothing to be lost in, which is what small talk, a predicate of awkwardness, is all about. Being something that can happen with just one person, awkwardness is very easy to carry out. And, as said before, this easiness also makes the awkwardness a double-edged sword: though it’s easy to happen, it’s also easy to dissipate.

The first step to having an unawkward conversation is simply to try for it to not be awkward. Some people, I feel, accept a conversation to be inherently awkward when it could easily be something else, because conversations are truly what you make of them. Subtext has no anatomical influence on a conversation. If you think to yourself, “well this is going to be awkward” it probably will be. But if you actually have confidence in yourself and say, “I’m above this” given whatever underlying circumstance there is and look past that, your conversation can be unawkward.

I’m not saying that one shouldn’t have standoffish feelings toward others who they may potentially be in a conversation with. Although many are against having a pleasant conversation with people they have standoffish feelings for, calling it “fake,” it sometimes is necessary. It isn’t something that I want to happen. I’m certainly not going out of my way for it. The problem is, it does happen and I’d rather spend that conversation being “fake” instead of being “awkward.” With fakeness, you can have a pleasant conversation, end it, turn around and think "I hate that person." With awkwardness, though, the negative emotions, whatever they may be, emanate between the two people, creating the worst kind of discordance.

So, please, don’t be a statistic; destroy the epidemic that is awkwardness. And, um, I know this is kind of awkward for me to ask, but, uh, could you please share this post?